Strong message here

Churchill is famous for his drinking. But he had strong views on food too. On being confronted with inadequate afters, he demanded: “Take this pudding away — it has no theme.” If the pudding that is the Conservative party is going to avoid being taken away, it needs to find a theme for the next election and find it soon.

This looks like quite a problem. The Conservatives have been in power for 13 years and after five Prime Ministers they seem to have worn out their welcome. Still, they’re going to have to come up with something. What are their options?

They say that there are two basic election slogans: “Stick with what you know” and “Time for a change”. Labour have opted for “Time for a change”. At the moment, the Conservatives seem to be offering neither.

Instead, they seem to be working back to front, compiling elements that can comprise talking points but without having an explicit hook on which to hang them. So we have Rishi Sunak’s five priorities, the war on woke (if trans rights and Just Stop Oil are both woke) and repeated hints of tax cuts to come before the next election. But so far, there’s no theme to link these all together.

The Conservatives seem to be inching towards “Stick with what you know”. If they can deliver on Rishi Sunak’s priorities and persuade the public that they can’t stomach wokeness, they might try to build a campaign around Conservative competence and fear of what Labour might do if they get in.

A largish fly in the ointment, however, is that Rishi Sunak’s priorities are proving rather harder to deliver than had been assumed at the beginning of the year. Inflation remains high and the measures needed to address it will hobble economic growth. That in turn makes reducing debt more challenging. The boats don’t look as if they’re stopping and NHS waiting lists continue to rise owing to the government’s inability to meet the terms that doctors are seeking.

There is a still larger fly in the ointment. It would perhaps be for the best if Rishi Sunak fails to meet his priorities. For the general public may regard other matters as more important. The richest Prime Minister in history always faced the risk of being seen as out of touch with the problems of everyday people. If he starts cavorting around in triumph for hitting his targets and the public haven’t felt any relief by then, he may well find they just give up on him.

So I’ll be helpful. “Stick with what you know” looks like a very tough sell this time. The two charts below (from Ipsos polling) show why it is torpedoed. Fewer than 1 in 7 voters think the country is going in the right direction. Any attempt to campaign on “Don’t Let Labour Ruin It” is going to be met with the riposte “ruin what exactly?”.

To make “Stick with what you know” work, the Conservatives would need to persuade large numbers of voters that although the country is on the wrong track after 13 years of Conservative government, the risk of things getting still worse with Labour is unacceptably high. Good luck trying to thread the eye of that particular needle.

What are the Conservatives’ options then? If they can’t make “Stick with what you know” work, how about “Time for a change”? It would take some nerve for a party to try to pull that off after 13 years in government. However, there is a precedent. Labour’s campaign in 2010 was consciously built around the idea of insurgency. It did notably well in very unpromising circumstances.

To pull that off, however, the Conservatives will need to identify change that only they can harness. They are helped in this respect by Labour’s caution. Labour sticking closely to Conservative spending plans makes it easier to portray them as the continuity party.

That’s the extent of the good news. The obvious avenues for a Conservative change campaign have been closed off by past events. Using anything built around going for growth and justifying tax cuts with that aim in mind walks into a rake labelled Liz Truss. And the idea of taking advantage of the opportunities of Brexit runs into the problem that the only people who think that Brexit has been a success are Conservative MPs.

Moreover, the Conservatives have entirely the wrong leader for a change campaign. Rishi Sunak is the epitome of a “Stick with what you know” leader, the opposite of an insurgent. He’s smooth, his claimed USP is competence, he not only comes from privilege, he looks and behaves privileged. He campaigned against Liz Truss’s “Time for a change” campaign for Conservative leader on the basis that it wouldn’t work. He would look ridiculous if he tried to portray himself as a plucky outsider now. He doesn’t have the political self-confidence to brazen out looking ridiculous.

There are politicians who could perform this trick. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson all managed to look as though they were in opposition to their own governments at times. Rishi Sunak, on the other hand, has sought to personalise the government as himself, meaning he can’t disown its failures. It is not a coincidence that the three named commanded their government while Rishi Sunak leads a government brokered between different wings of the Conservative party. They had the political strength to be able to disavow the missteps of others. Rishi Sunak doesn’t.

Is there a version of “Time for a change” that Rishi Sunak could plausibly front up? It would need to play into his temperament. It would need to move the national conversation on from Brexit and clichéd Tory talking points. One possibility is to seek a mandate to make some form of transformation built around technology: maybe an idea of making Britain the world leader in AI or the metaverse or self-driving cars or crypto or whatever. “A Britain fit for weirdos”: something like that.

Most importantly, it would be a forward-looking proposition offering hope. A Pandora’s box of horrors has struck the country over the last few years, but neither main party has rummaged as far as the bottom of the box to find the hope that the British people desperately need. This isn’t 1997 and the public don’t believe that things can only get better, but they want to believe that things can get better. Right now, they’re doubtful. This is an opportunity for the Conservatives to make the running against Labour for once instead of mitigate their own past catastrophes.

Would it work? It would have high risks of the bubble bursting on a technology being promoted, but the Conservatives need to be taking some risks now. I’m unconvinced that Rishi Sunak has the sales skills to take such a proposition to the British public and the British public is so low on trust that it might not be willing to listen to attempts to harness the future, especially from the Conservatives. It would require message discipline, something the Conservatives have been unable to maintain in recent months.

It would also be a high risk/high reward strategy. If it went wrong, the margin by which the Conservatives lost would probably be greater than if they’d taken a safety-first approach. For all that, it isn’t a strategy that looks forlorn on a cursory inspection.

What are their alternatives? They can go down quietly with a “Stick with what you know” strategy, accepting that they will probably lose given the state of the nation, and pin all their hopes on Labour stuffing it up (always a plausible hope).

Or they can decide that Rishi Sunak is an inadequate salesman for the change message based around Brexit, tax cuts and culture wars that they would be most comfortable promoting. If so, they need to act fast and find a more adequate salesperson (the most plausible candidate to convey such a message is Kemi Badenoch, but she’s even more inexperienced than Rishi Sunak was).

I suggest, however, that the Conservatives should seriously consider how they might portray a hopeful future in a way that doesn’t rely on their past discredited policies. They’ve still got more than a year to embed their message. They could try. It might work.